Probably won’t sell the queens for much money there, since anybody can collect 'em literally with breadcrumbs.

This is why we have CITES and total trade bans against things like ivory.

Doesn’t matter if the elephant died of natural causes and the herd moved on before the ivory was collected, sale of any ivory encourages poaching.

And the things locals do to collect pretty fish are heinous beyond their comprehension. That $50 tropical fish could be one of a hundred collected on a reef that is now dead due to use of cyanide to stun it for easier collection.

You don’t collect $1.1 million worth of ants for a hobby. Even if he has 5000 “friends” on his Belgian ant hobby board, I doubt he can show that they were just going to cover his collection expenses. In all likelihood, these would have been shipped all over the globe for years to come.

But you won’t get Kenyan harvester ants…

Your statement reminds me of entrepreneurship: you’ve got a dream, a vision, a goal to improve people’s lives. What you don’t got is enough money to get your dream into the hands of people it will help. So, you go in search of people with money who honestly don’t give a damn about your dream, they just want to know how it’s going to get them more money, which they already have in abundance but somehow feel the need to continue to grow their hoard. They want to see business plans, with exit strategies. They want to maximize ROI, minimize (monetary) risk, minimize time to market - and those are the criteria your pitch will be evaluated on relative to all the others they receive all the time.

Politicians aren’t selling a business plan, they’re selling a legislative agenda. They don’t have to show ROI, they have to show low-cost electability.

It was cringe when it released - it’s dated cringe now…

Again: guns are an equal access opportunity for all social classes.

For less than a couple hours’ minimum wage anyone can purchase lethal force in a convenient pocket carry size.

Pushing gun control with a sunset clause was pretty dumb, in hindsight.

Letting Russia take Crimea in 2014 was pretty dumb, in hindsight.

It’s easy to sit here today and judge the idiots of the past based on what we know now.

If I had a time machine and mind control ray would I go back and make them do it differently? Sure. Right after I told 2011 me to buy 1000 more bitcoin for $4 each and hold them until $50K.

Most punks I know aren’t poor, they’re just punks. They come from poor, middle class, and rich parents in pretty much equal proportion.

Your attitude is showing in your assumptions.

That’s the thing about being paranoid about MkUltra - it was actively suppressed and denied while it was happening (according to FOI documents) - and they say that they stopped, but if it (or some similar successor) was active they’d certainly say that it’s not happening now…

At the time there were active rumors around town about influenza propagation studies being secretly conducted on the local population… probably baseless paranoia… probably.

Now, as you say, your (presumably smaller) country has never known such things to happen, but…

The only thing driving solar panel production development to China is cost. Cost of labor, cost of environmental regulations, maybe cost of raw material acquisition… All that investment there for the past 20+ years driven by cost is “paying off” now with their production capacity. We’re getting TMSC plants in Arizona, we’ve already got BMW, Mercedes, Toyota etc. production plants in the US, nothing stopping us from building solar panel factories, except international corporate profit optimization.

Gotta love that freedum:

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/06/15/did-the-assault-weapons-ban-of-1994-bring-down-mass-shootings-heres-what-the-data-tells-us/

Oh, I investigated it too - it seems like it was a real thing, though likely inactive by 2005… but if it were active I certainly didn’t want to become a subject.

Bad results are nothing new.

Gun toting step father saturated in Faux News, he wasn’t going to vote for Liberal Commies even if they put a gun to his head at the ballot box.

If I had bought that Glock and 12 gauge, and practiced with them monthly, I probably would have invested about $5K total in the gun safe and a couple of other weapons - plus the time and ammunition, and I would have happily surrendered them AT THE SAME TIME as all of my neighbors should we have gone full UK gun ban here in the US. Not that I am typical, but the real problem with gun ownership is that guns are so cheap basically anybody can get one if it is the least bit important to them. Investing $50K in guns doesn’t make you any safer against the punk who walks up behind you with a .38 special. Banning guns, making them much harder to get and illegal to keep, that cuts down the number of punks who can get their hands on a .38 special in the first place.

Currently, we’re preventing the “sunken coastal cities, economic crisis and famine in poor regions” kind of change

Are we really preventing it? Seems like the track toward that change is mostly unabated. Sure, it’s a couple of generations out before it gets serious, but what are the signs that the track has improved?

I’m reading hopeful signs from China that they are actually making positive progress toward sustainability. Not that other big players are keeping up with them, but still how 1 billion people choose to live does make a difference.

It’s just that now it tries to be a bit more stealthy.

With regard to what has been happening the past 100 days in the United States, it’s not even trying to be stealthy one little bit. If anything, it’s dropping massive hints of the objectionable things it’s planning for the near future.

There are still existential threats: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

The difference with a population of 8 billion is that we as individuals are less empowered to do anything significant about them than ever.

1925: global financial collapse is just about to happen, many people are enjoying the ride as the wave just started to break, following that war to end all wars that did reach across the Atlantic Ocean…

Yes, it is accelerating. Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock 45 years ago, already overwhelmed by accelerating change, and it has continued to accelerate since then. But these are not entirely new problems, either.